Corsair 128GB Nova Series SSD Review

Introduction:

Not so long ago it was a high end luxury to have a solid state drive in your system. However, with the way technology keeps evolving and the way manufacturers are designing their products, owning a solid state drive is now within more user's grasp. Manufacturers are now making faster, more stable, solid state drives in a variety of speeds and capacities to meet everyone's budget and desire. For those of us who want the fastest speeds for benchmarking and pure computing bliss, manufacturers are using newer controllers which are free from the stuttering that early controllers such as the JMicron based SSD's used in the early days. One series of solid state drives taking the jump for faster and more stable technology is the Corsair Nova series. The Nova series offers high speeds using the Indilinx Controller which does away with the stability issues of once upon a time. Combine the high speeds with a two year warranty and a 114 year time to failure and you have yourself a pretty impressive new piece of technology. Corsair has a couple lines of solid state drives in its arsenal which have proven to be top contenders and the Nova Series shows signs to wrestle with the best of them.

The Nova series solid state drives come in two capacities. There is a 64GB model, which offers sequential read speeds of up to 270MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 130MB/s. There is also a 128GB version which offers the same sequential read speeds of up to 270MB/s but the sequential write speeds are increased to up to 195MB/s. Both drives also are built using the 2.5 inch form factor and use the SATA II interface. The Nova series uses MLC NAND Flash Technology which stands for Multi-level Cell which lets more bits per cell to be saved and reduces the overall cost of the drive. The particular model we are going to be looking at today is CSSD-V128GB2-BRKT which is the 128GB Nova Series Solid State Drive from Corsair.

Closer Look:

The Corsair Nova 128GB SSD comes packaged in a nice small box with a picture of the SSD on the front along with the model series and capacity so that you know exactly what you are getting when you buy it. On the back of the packaging is the product sticker (which contains the model number).

Once you get the package open there are two parts to the inside. There is the SSD, which is protected by a plastic protector and the 3.5 inch adapter desktop kit. The kit makes placing the drive into your system a breeze if your case does not have a spot to accommodate a 2.5 inch drive.

Now that we have the package open, we can open the drive up and see what makes the magic inside.